World War 2

  • When the guns of World War II finally fell silent in 1945, Europe faced not only the monumental task of rebuilding cities and economies, but also of seeking justice. Few names were as synonymous with betrayal as Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician whose collaboration with Nazi Germany turned his surname into a byword for “traitor.”…

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  • (Repost from January 22,2023) During the night of 21 to 22 January 1943, the Nazis raided Het Apeldoornsche Bosch, a Jewish psychiatric hospital in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Nearly 1300 people are deported to Auschwitz. All 1181 patients, sometimes naked, confused or in straitjackets, were forced by units of the SS and the Ordnungspolizei under the…

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  • My weapon- A plastic doll.

    This doll belonged to a 7 year old Belgian girl her name was Aline Klajn. I could say 2 things about Aline. I could say she was from Polish parents and I could also say she was Jewish. But none of that warranted her death, but yet it did. She was killed because she was…

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  • Masha Bruskina was a Russian teenage female partisan. She was a 17-year-old Jewish high school graduate and was the first teenage girl to be publicly hanged by the Nazis in Belarus, since the German invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. Masha Bruskina was born in Minsk, in the Soviet Union,…

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  • Mary Elmes-Forgotten hero

    (Firts published on October 5 2017) Marie Elisabeth Jean Elmes (5 May 1908 – 9 March 2002)was an Irish businesswoman and aid worker who is credited with saving the lives of at least 200 Jewish children during the Holocaust by hiding them in the boot of her car.In 2015, she became the first and so far…

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  • This is a little known story which took place on the 13th of May 1944. The victims were Chinese citizens, not tortured and killed by Japanese but by the Gestapo in Hamburg,Germany. It requires a lot of imagination to recollect the past history that the Schmuckstraße as the center of a lively Chinese district of…

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  • The biggest group of Holocaust victims were the Jews, an estimated six million were murdered between 1933 and 1945. The second biggest group were the Gipsies (Roma and Sinti). During World War II, it is estimated that more than 500,000 Sinti and Roma from all over Europe were murdered by the Nazis in what has…

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  • No one can deny that the Nazis committed unspeakable atrocities against civilians during World War II. However, they were not the only ones responsible for such horrors The Nemmersdorf Massacre, which occurred on October 21, 1944, is one of the most controversial and horrific episodes of World War II. It took place in the East…

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  • Westerbork-Auschwitz

    The picture above is one of the most iconic images of the Holocaust, For decades it was believed that the girl in the picture was Jewish. In December 1992, Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar started to research her identity. By following the number on the outside of the wagon, number 10, 16 or 18, the description…

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  • Maastricht is one of my favourite cities. I grew up only about 10 miles away and visited it many times. It is the most south-eastern city in the Netherlands and is well known for its proximity to Belgium and Germany. It is also the home of violin virtuoso Andre Rieu and his Strauss Orchestra. In…

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